On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Bill Nottingham <notting@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > http://git.gnome.org/ > http://spins.fedoraproject.org/ > > The beautiful thing about open source is that you always have that choice. > Sure, you may not like the amount of effort that may be involved (on a > scale that goes from switching your local desktop, all the way up to forking > your own copy of GNOME 2.30 and taking it in whatever direction you feel > like), but it doesn't mean you don't have that choice. Even if there were no "open source" you'd have the _choice_ of creating your own operating system and software all from scratch if the available software didn't work the way you needed it to. But because of the enormous effort required that "freedom" isn't very meaningful. Likewise, when the whole distribution is driven in a particular direction going against that direction is quite costly: Even if you're willing to put in the effort to support and maintain gnome 2.30 you will still suffer from the fact that Fedora is developed against and tested with the new stuff and will almost certainly become gratuitously incompatible with the old stuff. People use distributiosn because assembling and maintaining the whole system on their own is not a good (or available) option for them. Fedora's support for non-standard configurations is not especially good, even compared to some other distributions. The difference from the above no-open-source example is only quantitative. Meaningfully so, but "you can break free from the fedora default and engage in an unsupported high effort configuration" is still not a valid argument against claims that a decision is net-detrimental to the Fedora user community, even if it is technically true. That sort of argument should be rebutted with evidence that on the whole and in the long term the change is expected to be beneficial to the user community and/or the GNU/Linux ecosystem overall and evidence that these goals could not otherwise be met through means which deprived (by forcing them into non-standard configurations) fewer users of the value that Fedora provides. -- test mailing list test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
